Top 80 Evelyn Underhill Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.”

— Evelyn Underhill

2. “My growth depends on my walls coming down.”

— Evelyn Underhill

3. “God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.”

— Evelyn Underhill

4. “In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.”

— Evelyn Underhill

5. “This is the secret of joy. We shall no longer strive for our own way; but commit ourselves, easily and simply, to God’s way, acquiesce in His will, and in so doing find our peace.”

— Evelyn Underhill

6. “For lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.”

— Evelyn Underhill

7. “Love is creative. It does not flow along the easy paths, spending itself in the attractive. It cuts new channels, goes where it is needed.”

— Evelyn Underhill

8. “The spiritual life of individuals has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore more truly personal it will become.”

— Evelyn Underhill

9. “I do hope your Christmas has had a little touch of Eternity in among the rush and pitter patter and all. It always seems such a mixing of this world and the next – but that after all is the idea!”

— Evelyn Underhill

10. “Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.”

— Evelyn Underhill

11. “Adoration is caring for God above all else.”

— Evelyn Underhill

12. “The note we end on is and must be the note of inexhaustible possibility and hope.”

— Evelyn Underhill

13. “Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God.”

— Evelyn Underhill

14. “The life, beauty and meaning of the whole created order, from the tomtit to the Milky Way, refers back to the Absolute Life and Beauty of its Creator: and so lived, every bit has spiritual significance.”

— Evelyn Underhill

15. “The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a consoling retreat from the difficulties of existence; but an invitation to enter fully into that difficult existence, and there apply the Charity of God and bear the cost.”

— Evelyn Underhill

16. “Many people feel unaware of any guidance, unable to discern or understand the signals of God; not because the signals are not given, but because the mind is too troubled, clouded, and hurried to receive them.”

— Evelyn Underhill

17. “Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.”

— Evelyn Underhill

18. “After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.”

— Evelyn Underhill

19. “There is no place in my soul, no corner of my character, where God is not.”

— Evelyn Underhill

20. “Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer.”

— Evelyn Underhill

21. “The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man’s life; and until he has realized it, he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers.”

— Evelyn Underhill

22. “It seems so much easier in these days to live morally than to live beautifully. Lots of us manage to exist for years without ever sinning against society, but we sin against loveliness every hour of the day.”

— Evelyn Underhill

23. “The mystic cannot wholly do without symbol and image, inadequate to his vision though they must always be: for his experience must be expressed if it is to be communicated, and its actuality is inexpressible except in some hint or parallel which will stimulate the dormant intuition of the reader.”

— Evelyn Underhill

24. “Man’s will and God’s grace rise and fall together.”

— Evelyn Underhill

25. “The first question here, then, is not “What is best for my soul?” nor is it even “What is most useful to humanity?” But-transcending both these limited aims-what function must this life fulfill in the great and secret economy of God?”

— Evelyn Underhill

26. “Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God...”

— Evelyn Underhill

27. “Saints are the great teachers of the loving-kindness and fascination with God.”

— Evelyn Underhill

28. “Love makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom.”

— Evelyn Underhill

29. “We spend most of our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do.”

— Evelyn Underhill

30. “On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.”

— Evelyn Underhill

31. “It looks impossible until you do it, and then you find it is possible.”

— Evelyn Underhill

32. “Your dreamer may do without a creed, but he always wants a ritual...”

— Evelyn Underhill

33. “As the social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual world.”

— Evelyn Underhill

34. “All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty; for beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.”

— Evelyn Underhill

35. “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.”

— Evelyn Underhill

36. “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.”

— Evelyn Underhill

37. “Grace is God himself, his loving energy at work within his church and within our souls.”

— Evelyn Underhill

38. “We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.”

— Evelyn Underhill

39. “It is important to increase our sense of God’s richness and wonder by reading what his great lovers have said about him.”

— Evelyn Underhill

40. “Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination.”

— Evelyn Underhill

41. “When the vivid reality which is meant by these rather abstract words is truly possessed by us, when that which is unchanging in ourselves is given its chance, and emerges from the stream of succession to recognise its true home and goal, which is God – then, though much suffering may, indeed will, remain; apprehension, confusion, instability, despair, will cease.”

— Evelyn Underhill

42. “The mystic lives and looks; and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience.”

— Evelyn Underhill

43. “God is much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer.”

— Evelyn Underhill

44. “The determined fixing of our will upon God, and pressing toward him steadily and without deflection; this is the very center and the art of prayer.”

— Evelyn Underhill

45. “I do not think reading the mystics would hurt you myself: you say you must avoid books which deal with ‘feelings’ – but the mystics don’t deal with feelings but with love which is a very different thing. You have too many ‘feelings,’ but not nearly enough love.”

— Evelyn Underhill

46. “The life of prayer is so great and various there is something in it for everyone. It is like a garden which grows everything, from alpines to potatoes.”

— Evelyn Underhill

47. “There is no trustworthy standard by which we can separate the ‘real’ from the ‘unreal’ aspects of phenomena. Such standards as exist are conventional: and correspond to convenience, not to truth. It is no argument to say that most men see the world in much the same way, and that this “way” is the true standard of reality: though for practical purposes we have agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbors.”

— Evelyn Underhill

48. “Being, not Doing, is the first aim of the mystic; and hence should be the first interest of the student of mysticism.”

— Evelyn Underhill

49. “The London streets are paths of loveliness; the very omnibuses look like colored archangels, their laps filled full of little trustful souls.”

— Evelyn Underhill

50. “I have an idea heaven will be both absolutely happy and absolutely dark, to protect us from the blaze of God.”

— Evelyn Underhill